CONDITION MONITORING OF OFF-HIGHWAY TRUCK TIRES AT SUNGUN COPPER MINE USING NEURAL NETWORKS / MONITOROWANIE STANU TECHNICZNEGO OPON W CIĘŻKICH POJAZDACH TERENOWYCH EKSPLOATOWANYCH W KOPALNI MIEDZI SUNGUN, PRZY UŻYCIU SIECI NEURONOWYCH

Abstract

Abstract Maintenance cost of the equipment is one of the most important portions of the operating expenditures in mines; therefore, any change in the equipment productivity can lead to major changes in the unit cost of the production. This clearly shows the importance and necessity of using novel maintenance methods instead of traditional approaches, in order to reach the minimum sudden occurrence of the equipment failure. For instance, the tires are costly components in maintenance which should be regularly inspected and replaced among different axles. The paper investigates the current condition of equipment tires at Sungun Copper Mine and uses neural networks to estimate the wear of the tires. The Input parameters of the network composed of initial tread depth, time of inspection and consumed tread depth by the time of inspection. The output of the network is considered as the residual service time ratio of the tires. The network trained by the feed-forward back propagation learning algorithm. Results revealed a good coincidence between the real and estimated values as 96.6% of correlation coefficient. Hence, better decisions could be made about the tires to reduce the sudden failures and equipment breakdowns.